Am I glad I went on holidays and did not have to suffer through the last 2 months of bets. To be honest, I’m not sure if I would still be betting if I had stayed home. I left with $40,000 in profit and my monkey all trained up. He was to place Tennis, MLB, AFL and set the Formbet autobot. The hope was to see my profit climb over $50,000 for the first time as it was this time last year that my bank went on a nice run.
My first stop was London and after 7 days the bank was down $10,000. This wasn’t that unexpected as I’ve hit the $40,000 barrier a few times and it is always quickly followed by a crash back down. I checked all bets to make sure the monkey was doing things right and it seemed as though I am an awesome teacher as everything was correct.
After a week in London, it was time to drive around England for a bit. I headed to my old abode in Bristol and then to catch up with some friends in Taunton, before heading to Dartmoor and Torquay. This 7 day period was spent driving, drinking (not at the same time), and exploring. I didn’t bother checking my spreadsheet as I was having too much fun. I was off to Paris the next day and wasn’t sure what sort of internet access I would have so I logged in just to check that everything was going OK. Everything was not OK, my total profit read $11,000, so a fall of $20,000 in a week. If you have been reading my blog religiously (and why shouldn’t you be, it’s a great read), then you will know that I have had one other week like this before, but that was quickly followed by my best ever week.
So now I had lost $30,000 within 2 weeks of getting on the plane. Most of the losses were due to Formbet but I will speak about that later.
Off to Paris for 3 days and then Milan to catch up with some old friends. The 8th of August was 1 year, 1 month and 8 days after I had started this crazy ride and also the day that it seemed like a complete waste of time. Profit was $0. Over a year of work for nothing. I would say on average I spend 2 hours a day placing bets and recording results. So 806 hours had been spent for nothing, if I had been on minimum wage ($15.51) that would have given me $12,501. I remember logging into my computer and seeing that result and realising that this dream was more then likely over. I had given it a good try and it had not worked. Now I was more worried about losing even more money. The holiday wasn’t cheap and with this $40,000 loss only 3 weeks in things were not looking very rosy.
The next week I was having a great time travelling through Tuscany, I don’t even think I thought about how bad the betting was going. Travelling does that to me, it is one of the things I really do love to do and de-stresses me. If i was sat at home I would have been worrying about every single bet and just getting more and more depressed. I am enjoying placing bets again but now that I know I have someone who can do the job for me, I might just hand it off to them for good. When I checked again at the end of the week it had been a break even week.
Back to the UK and then to Dover to board my cruise ship. A quick side note, the cruise was pretty great and the food in the main dining hall was some of the best I have ever had, but the service was terrible. Within 15minutes they had ruined my laptop by breaking the screen, and all they said was bad luck, we hope you have insurance, they would not help out at all with a replacement and just didn’t seem to care. I emailed their customer support and over 6 weeks and I still have not received a reply. Holland America Line, you are pathetic. ahh, got that off my chest. So now I was on this cruise and very pissed that they had ruined my laptop, i still had my ipad but was not going to pay 75cent a minute for dial up speed internet. So I could only check how I was going when in port.
The 25th of August I was in Lisbon and found a cafe with free Wifi, I logged into my computer and my profit/loss read -$8371. It was time to make some drastic changes. Formbet had been on a terrible run and Dave was chopping and changing the bot and making it very hard to keep following the service, and then sent out an email saying that the bot picks should only be supplementary to people doing their own work. This was more then enough for me to quit using his service all together. I told the monkey to stop using the bot and to concentrate on just the sportpunter models which were also having a poor time but which I had much more faith in. This turned out to be a master stroke, as formbet would have dragged me down even further over the coming weeks. I made a lot of errors with formbet, i was staking too high, missed a winning day, but in the end I now believe the service the way I wanted to use it was not profitable. I bet daily for over 9 months and in the end I was down over $25,000. I feel it has some merit in its ratings but the autobot and systems did not produce a long term profit for me. Dave seems like a nice guy and Formbet may work for other punters but it did not work for me.
So now i was staring down the barrel, the first real time I had been in any sort of negative territory, and it had all come about so quickly. My starting bank was 50k and I wasn’t going to do anything until it reached -$20,000, so I told the monkey to carry on, he was worried it was his fault but I reassured him that it wasn’t and gave him a few bananas to quiet him down. Without the constant drain of Formbet (MLB and Tennis were also doing badly), and with the start of the US open, the bank managed to claw its way back up to evens.
I flew back to the UK from Barcelona and then hopped on a plane to New York on the 1st of September. During this 2 day period, Sportpunter had the greatest run of long priced winners I have ever seen. After settling into New York, i logged into my computer to see a profit of $19,700. I instantly thought a mistake had been made and went over each bet, but there was no mistake, the Sportpunter tennis model was back. After 2 days of poor results it continued it’s climb into the $20,000, this was helped by the MLBs resurrection also. By the time I left Vegas it was back at $24,000 profit.
Yosemite and San Fran were next and with AFL having a great week and MLB and Tennis going along nicely the profit climbed back into the $30,000 area. I really couldn’t believe the comeback. From dropping $48,000 to almost making it all back in the same amount of time. I left LA and returned home last Friday to a profit of $37,000, it has hovered around that mark for the last 5 days also.
So in the end, after the craziest 2 months, I have lost a total of around $3,000. In the next few days I will share my thoughts on this and the lessons learnt. But to put it quickly, the main lesson learnt was to not worry about short term losses or gains and to make sure each model in my portfolio has the correct bank size.
On another note, I had a look through my past results and if I had just followed Sportpunter models and no others, I would be up over $75,000. In saying that, I have now signed up for another well known Horse racing model, and FB Elite and Football Investor to go along with Skeeve. Time will tell if I was stupid to not just bet the Sportpunter models.
Total loss for the 2 months was $3,194.40
Baseball $425,890.01 $15,994.01 3.8%
2 month profit/loss: -295.98
Baseball Line $566,544.00 $21,583.17 3.8%
2 month profit/loss: 1578.15
AFL $86,564.00 $(1,228.90) -1.4%
2 month profit/loss: -2776.51
AFL line $276,350.00 $27,893.76 10.1%
2 month profit/loss: -152.61
Tennis – ATP $479,036.13 $26,924.50 5.6%
2 month profit/loss: 15839.27
WTA – Tennis $511,712.00 $12,305.42 2.4%
2 month profit/loss: -311.45
NRL $28,367.00 $(7,863.97) -27.7%
2 month profit/loss: -38.40
Formbet $224,207.44 $(20,388.12) -9.1%
2 month profit/loss: -17424.12
Stats
Total bet amount: $3,874,400.94
Profit/Loss: $37,636.17
POT: 1.0%
Bets Placed: 8,833
Won: 3,643
Lost: 4,888
Half Payout: 4
Refunded: 298
Winning %: 42.7%
Profit per day: 37,636.17 / 455 = $82.72
Click to enlarge